Author Jude Collins

I’m baffled. Confused. At a loss. I’ve just done a word-count of Arlene Foster’s manifesto speech. It comes to a mite short of 3,000 words. In it she mentions a lot of things –  Gerry Adams twelve times – but she doesn’t mention the leader of the party which is the DUP’s main rival, Sinn Féin’s […]

Today’s Alliance Party vehemently deny that it continues to be a small ‘u’ Unionist party, fully supportive of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status remaining that of a region within the United Kingdom. However, I would venture, Alliance are no-more than a relatively liberal pro-UK party committed to simply advancing modernity in this region of the UK. […]

It’s always instructive to see ourselves as others see us, providing of course that we don’t get obsessed with  what the neighbours must think of us. So when I noted this morning that The Guardian website has an editorial on our little NE nest. The editoris contained a number of valid points. “Only a fraction of the […]

Jonathan Bell – remember him? For a while back there, you couldn’t turn on the telly without seeing his sad little face and worried forehead and – momentarily – tear-filled eyes. He did a lot of calling on the support of God at the time, even kneeling with his spiritual adviser before facing Nolan (a […]

I first met Martin McGuinness when I was a youngster and he had his Anthony Eden hat on then. I was climbing lampposts with posters to help Sinn Fein get elected and he was the Education Minister. The time that I most remember of him is when I was behind him at an event when […]

When the anti Brexit campaign began along the border, I spent a good deal of time talking to a journalist from the Financial Times. He came along to the Rally we organised on the Fermanagh/Cavan border and as well as giving him an interview, I introduced him to others from the area. Yet in his […]

Sometimes my heart goes out to Mike Nesbitt and Colum Eastwood. Both come trailing clouds of glory from yesteryear: don’t forget, they were the two parties that launched Stormont power-sharing. But, as the song says, that was yesterday, now yesterday’s gone. Both parties know, deep in their boots, that it’ll never be glad confident morning […]

We must return to the promise of our 1998 Belfast Agreement peace deal by fully implementing that Agreement… or we condemn ourselves to perpetual strife and division. Ireland was the British crown’s first colony, and the Northern Ireland state is an undemocratic gerrymandered remnant of that once larger colony. British conquest of Ireland was immoral, […]

  Sometimes it’s easier to allow one’s inner cat get his way and so, one found oneself in the last week curiously entering a cinema , hoping for two simple things: that nobody had spotted one and that the fillum wouldn’t be as brutal as one feared. Actually, it wasn’t. Indeed, it turned out to […]

   Pics 1-4 are by Perkin Warbeck Pic 1 Pic 2 Pic 3 Pic 4   “A SPACE of HONEY Malta has long been a b-word for honey. Indeed, the name itself is redolent of the sweet, sticky, yellowish fluid of the bees. Not unlike Clonmel / Cluain Meala in Tipperary ( not so far […]